Enquiring Ear

Field recording and found sounds

Month: October 2014

  • Installing cavity wall insulation

    A neighbour was having cavity wall insulation installed. This seemed to be polystyrene beads about 3mm diameter blown into a hole drilled from the outside. The machine makes a prodigious racket.

    A truck was parked on the road and a massive compressor started up. The noise increased when the beads were loaded up, from big plastic sacks. Job was done in a day and a bit.

    I still wonder what happens to that sort of thing in a fire. It’s better contained than the ghastly polystyrene tiles people used to insulate ceilings with decades ago. This continued until the fire brigade public service ads on TV about what happened in a fire. Polystyrene still produces nasty fumes, however.

    Probably recorded with an Olympus LS something XY

  • Apple crusher crunching sound

    Apple crusher crunching sound

    There’s a satisfying noise to be had from this apple crusher – the first stages of making cider

    The crunch has some of the biting into an apple sound. The ripping apart sound is ever so slightly ghoulish, one for Halloween…

    After this was recorded a bunch of people joined in with their kids. Kids aren’t usually conducive to easy recording, though they did a grand job turning the handle, so I switched to using a stereo contact mic on the mechanism. My contact mic has a strong magnet on it so it’ easy to get noises from ferrous metal objects.

    I had to EQ out the 3kHz resonance of the mic, but the result is less satisfying than the regular recording to my ears.

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  • Echoes of South Kensington Station

    Echoes of South Kensington Station

    South Kensington Tube station is the gateway to some of London’s famous museums – the Natural History museum, the Victoria and Albert and the Science Museum. To save people getting wet or wrangling the traffic along Exhibition Road, there is a long pedestrian walkway from the station to the museums.

    It has a fabulous acoustic, one that’s enjoyed by small children, buskers and field recordists alike! I went to university at Imperial College and used this tunnel often. Even now, the soundmark takes me back to student times…

    Here’s the sound of a busker using the acoustic well, and some kids enjoying the tunnel later on

  • Robins at Alderman Canal

    Robins at Alderman Canal

    There is a little nature reserve by the canal near the football ground, an oasis of calm. The water is sluggish with green on top apart from where the water seems to well up from the river bed in these gently roiling clear pools. I don’t think the water makes any sound here, there is some background traffic noise which would mask it.

    The nature reserve was improved by the Access to Nature project in 2012. It’s easy to be cynical about some of these projects but this one seems to have worked really well, and there was a lot more birdsong in this part of path by the canal than in the unimproved bits.